Rubin's move to the Washington Post in November 2010 became a national news story and was discussed by the media on all sides of the political spectrum, ranging from The American Conservative and the Weekly Standard, to Salon Magazine and the Slate magazine. In 2011, she was included on the list of "50 Most Influential American Jews" by The Forward.[4]

Political views

Slate blogger David Weigel called Rubin "one of the right’s most prolific online political writers".[5] The Commentary editor John Podhoretz writes that Rubin "labored daily from her home in suburban Virginia [...] never missing a news story, never missing an op-ed column, reading everything and digesting everything and commenting on everything. She is a phenomenon, especially considering that for the first two decades of her working life, she was not a writer or a journalist but a lawyer specializing in labor issues [..]".[6] In welcoming remarks, The Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt writes that "her provocative writing has become 'must read' material for news and policy makers and avid political watchers."[7]

After joining the Washington Post, Rubin drew criticism in the wake of the 2011 Norway attacks after she published a blog post suggesting incorrectly that the attacks were carried out by Islamic jihadists.[20] In a follow-up column,[21] Rubin acknowledged that her decision to blame Muslim extremists for the Norway attacks was premature, but she did not apologize for her remarks nor did she condemn the right-wing anti-Muslim ideology that motivated the attacker, Anders Behring Breivik. Jeffrey Goldberg defended Rubin's initial article that falsely accused Muslims of perpetrating the attack.[22]

Rubin used her blog to accuse the Occupy Wall Street movement of antisemitism.[23] In her blog posts Rubin promoted a video by the Emergency Committee for Israel that purported to show antisemitism at the Occupy Wall Street protest. Critics of Rubin have described her portrayal of the protest movement as inaccurate, noting that the large number of Jews affiliated with the movement, the confrontations between OWS protestors and antisemites, and the financial ties between the Emergency Committee for Israel and Wall Street firms.[24] Others have noted that Rubin's primary example of what she calls "antisemitism" is actually a mentally unstable homeless man unaffiliated with the OWS movement who has been wandering the lower Manhattan financial district for years.[25]

In Oct 2011, Rubin again drew criticism for tweeting a blog post by Rachel Abrams, which some have interpreted as a call for genocide against the Palestinian people. Liberal Jewish advocacy group J Street described the blog post as an "unhinged rant filled with incitement and hate speech".[26] Beirut's English language newspaper Al-Akhbar ran a story by Max Blumenthal headlined "Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin promotes call for Palestinian genocide",[27] whereas Media Matters Senior Foreign Policy Fellow M.J. Rosenberg argued that Rubin's support for such a position should disqualify her from writing for the Washington Post.[28]

On November 7, 2012, following the presidential election, Rubin published a 'post-mortem' column criticizing the unsuccessful Mitt Romney campaign as ineffectual.[29] In response, others criticized Rubin as having been disingenuous or misleading during her pre-election coverage of the 2012 campaign. This was because Rubin had previously praised the Romney campaign for the same areas she found fault with after the election was over. [30]